Tag Archives for dragons

Authors note: z2 is currently on blog tour through the fine folks at Reading Addiction Virtual Book Tours. The post below is part of that tour and it appeared a few days ago on a blog called Clutter Your Kindle. My thoughts were inspired by a post I wrote here back in 2013, two whole books ago. A lot has changed for me since then, but apparently other things haven’t changed much at all.

I confess, I never got into the thrill of the whole dragon phase that fantasy lovers went through a couple of decades ago when I was a young adult reader, and maybe I shouldn’t tell you this but I’ve never been all that into vampires either. Hey, different things appeal to different people. I do confess to a certain lingering fascination with werewolves, however, and maybe it is because they helped me figure out how much I just don’t like the dead guys. So enter the whole zombie fascination. Okay, to each their own, but zombies turn my stomach.

Which does make the fact that I called my third novel z2 a little problematic. Zombies showed up a few years ago and they are still around. Brad Pitt even stared in a movie called World War Z last summer. Every search I do that starts with a z continues to turn up zombie books, zombie movies, and just plain more zombies. We really do have a zombie problem.

So why did I pick that name? Well, I had already made the mistake of naming my first novel x0, only to discover that you can’t make superscripts appear on a blog or anywhere else that matters. I wanted to name my second novel x1, but my love of X-men got me to change it to y1, not wanting to seem like an imitator. So it looked like my third novel needed to be called z2. You know, x0, y1, z2…..

It fit the story well for the book’s hero Alex Zeitman to form a club at the high school where he teaches, and for him to call the club z2. He pronounces it “zee squared” and it is for those who can warp time like himself and for others fascinated by time travel. I refer to the book as “zee squared”. Everyone else calls it “zee two” because you can’t tell it’s a superscript. This was definitely not the way to name a book. Worse yet, some readers have told me that they thought my book was about a second coming of zombies. Good grief.

Have I learned my lesson yet? No. Of course not. The last three books in the 46.Ascending collection have superscript titles too. c3 came out in Kindle a few months ago and d4 will be out this fall. I guess I like the consistency. Maybe I like doing things the hard way. Maybe it just fits to have superscripts for super heroes. Yeah, that’s it. Superscripts for super heroes.